The paper discusses partial synonymy, ie synonymy and paronymy. The first chapter is entitled Croatian language and it talks about the Croatian language in general, its origin, the dialects it consists of and at the end it talks about its standardization. It also argues that the standard language should be constantly learned because it is not acquired by birth, and also that it should be constantly studied because it functions as an organ. The second chapter further discusses lexicology, ie the linguistic discipline that conducts research, descriptions, and theoretical analysis of lexems. Furthermore, the paper discusses partial synonymy and briefly introduces the relations that are considered partial synonyms, which will be discussed later. The first relation that is mentioned and discussed in more detail is synonymy, its definition is given, as well as the definition of synonyms and their division and criteria by which it is determined whether a word is a synonym or not. After that, the paper discusses paronymy and paronyms in more detail, the definition of paronymy and paronyms is also given, as well as their division and criteria by which a word is considered a paronym. At the very end of the paper, it discusses desynonymization, which is considered to be one of the ways in which paronyms are formed, they are created by the breakdown of synonyms.